


as if you did not love

by wasd



Category: Buzz (Korea Band), 아는 형님 | Knowing Bros | Ask Us Anything
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Post-Break Up, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-29 20:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15081593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wasd/pseuds/wasd
Summary: everything that happened after Kyunghoon broke up with Heechul justified the choice he made.





	as if you did not love

**Author's Note:**

> a quick vignette to remind myself i can write "canon" too. end result: i fucked up :D: this is what happens when i listen to too many the national songs. the biblical reference is job 1:20-21 (king james version).
> 
> title from the literal translation of the korean title of buzz's [사랑하지 않은 것처럼 (the love)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gszuEGmVWlQ).

They hadn't even really been dating, anyway. It was only a half-year's worth of texts and cut-off phone calls, stolen kisses in bathroom stalls of TV studios whenever their schedules intersected, finger-shaped bruises on their wrists and waists hidden beneath clothing, and once, memorably, Heechul fucking Kyunghoon's mouth in a fire exit just before a Music Bank live performance.

Kyunghoon had still sung perfectly afterwards.

Everything that happened after Kyunghoon broke up with Heechul justified the choice he made. Heechul and his group fulfilled their CEO's ambitions, visiting countries Kyunghoon hadn't even known existed, winning at the pop charts and the year-end award shows. Their songs played in department stores and cafes and pochangs, were the ringtones of strangers Kyunghoon sat next to on the bus or train; each time, no matter how distorted the sound got, Kyunghoon could pick out the fragments of Heechul's verses.

Meanwhile, Kyunghoon plummeted. Shamefully jerked off to exactly one Super Junior performance, before he was overcome with his own self-loathing. Tried to call the number stored under Heechul's name in his phone; the robotic voice told him the number was no longer in service. A few weeks later, he'd lose his phone after a drinking binge—and with it, the only tangible proof that he had once known Heechul, had liked him and been liked back. 

That could've been devastating, except the losses kept coming, one after the next—his members, his band, his voice, the music that he so desperately wanted to keep making, everything that he'd held onto the hardest being the first to slip from his grasp—that all he could muster was a twisted kind of relief: at least, I survived that one.

Maybe Kyunghoon had been selfish when he let Heechul go, too afraid of the impassable gulf between what they tried to keep close and what the world wanted to take from them. But if he hadn't, nothing Kyunghoon could have offered would be worth anything Heechul might have lost.

*

In the intervening years, he'd crossed paths with Heechul's members. They were all, uniformly, cordial, respectful to their sunbae. He's been tempted to ask them, Kyuhyun, Kangin—how is he? is he doing ok? is he happy? 

(He kept his secrets for too long—tucked his words behind his teeth and ribs, fragile as paper and twice as flammable—that it was as reflexive as blinking, as breathing. He learned silence like a habit: open-eyed in the salt-water dark; a frog in a boiling pot; water over stone. His untidy thoughts in their untidy towers crumpling inside his chest, calcifying with every blink, every breath.) 

Nothing ever crossed his lips. He'd given up the right to care about Heechul's well-being a long time ago. 

*

Heechul was gone from his life, but still, he remained: flotsam and jetsam about dramas Kyunghoon never watched, a certain brand of cigarettes, a flowery shirt balled up and buried in his closet, a fading scar from a scratch that didn't quite heal right. 

Once, he was at the house of a friend's friend, and the owner's cat, a sweet Russian Blue, had padded up to him, started twining itself around his legs. He spent the rest of the night, stone-cold sober, vomiting into the toilet.

A half-year of momentary encounters—for a lifetime with a ghost no shaman could ever exorcise.

*

Proposals from production companies flooded in after Hidden Singer aired. He ignored most of them, including an insistent offer for a permanent spot on a new variety show with a handful of prominent names Kyunghoon hadn't paid attention to. He thought he'd learned his lesson about exposing the soft, raw underbelly of his monstrous self to the touch of ungentle hands; obviously, he hadn't. 

After his manager returned from a fruitless meeting with JTBC, he held out, perplexed, an envelope with Kyunghoon's name neatly printed on the front. "They said they'd been told to pass this on to you. They won't tell me who it's from."

Kyunghoon took the envelope, caught a whiff of flowers—and peach?, broke the seal and out slid a scrap of note-paper embossed with an S.M. Entertainment logo, a hasty scribbled line in blue ink: _If you're not saying yes because of me, don't worry, I can be professional._

The handwriting was unfamiliar, but there was only one person from S.M. who could've written it.

(There were so many things he never got a chance to learn about Heechul. The forms of his calligraphy, his nicknames for his pets, how he might have reacted if Kyunghoon had said the words that his actions were too clumsy to express. Kyunghoon could only have the useless, irrelevant trivia—the sounds he made, muffled into Kyunghoon's mouth; the weight of his cock on Kyunghoon's tongue; his cold acceptance when Kyunghoon had said that they should end it.)

 _Sure_ , Kyunghoon thought, _I can be professional too_ , and told his manager to set up another meeting with the Knowing Brothers PD.

*

He missed the shoot for the first episode. 

An unexpected scheduling conflict, his manager told the production staff, lying through his teeth as he half-carried, half-dragged Kyunghoon into the emergency room. 

As a nurse prepared the IV, Kyunghoon lay on the bed provided him, trying to remember how to exhale. The needle sliding under his bruise-mottled skin tethered his foundering courage to the rest of him. He could hear his mother saying, from a golden childhood before sorrow came: _Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away._

*

The Heechul he met again, a decade after their long goodbye, was unknown to him. The shape of him was the same, but the angles were all wrong. 

"I hope we can be friends," Heechul said, clear-eyed and kind, nothing like the boy-chimera that attracted and repulsed Kyunghoon from the distant past. The acid in Heechul had receded, leaving behind a tartness that delighted, and never burned.

"Friends," Kyunghoon echoed—of everything they'd been to each other, they had never been that. Heechul had wanted too little; Kyunghoon had wanted too much.

But his body still ached in the nooks and crannies which Heechul had been the first to discover. As the weeks passed, sometimes only the weight of stifled things anchored his feet to the ground, while the clenched fist of his secrets trembled, yearning to unfurl for Heechul's empty hand. 

He told himself: this is his gift for the both of you. A chance to forget the old fear that made them brittle, their entanglement that was a radiating spider-web of cracks which took only a touch to shatter. A fresh start, a clean slate, terra incognita unmarked with unlanced wounds.

At four a.m., Kyunghoon typed into his phone's search bar, _how to forget muscle memory._ It made sense—he’d learned in school that the heart (treacherous, fickle, unchanged) was a muscle.


End file.
